Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Why Obama’s epic climate plan isn’t such a big deal

The carbon
regulations that President Barack Obama is unveiling today sound like they’ll
be a bit stronger than the toothless draft rules he unveiled last year. That doesn’t mean they’ll be strong.
And it certainly doesn’t mean they’ll be “the strongest action ever taken to
combat climate change,” as The New York Times breathlessly referred to them in
its news pages yesterday morning.

It’s not
yet clear exactly what they’ll be, because so far the Obama administration has
only revealed some non-binding national goals, not the hard emissions targets
that states will be required to meet. But the early leaks suggest that the
Clean Power Plan will require the electricity sector to decarbonize slightly
more than it would have under the draft plan. The sector’s emissions are
expected to drop 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, up from 30 percent in the
draft. The plan now anticipates renewable energy to rise to 28 percent of the
grid’s capacity by 2030, instead of 22 percent, and coal to drop to 27 percent
of capacity, instead of 31 percent.

That’s
nice, but by the end of this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance,
the power sector’s emissions will already be down 15.4 percent from 2005 levels —

about half
the anticipated reductions in just a decade, and before the plan goes into
effect.

In other
words, even under the strengthened plan, the rate of decarbonization is
expected to slow over the next 15 years. What, did you think the strongest
action ever taken to combat climate change would actually accelerate the
nation’s efforts to combat climate change?

The final
rule will also delay the first deadline for states to meet interim targets from
2020 to 2022, a significant walkback in a plan that Obama, cueing the Times,
called “the biggest, most important step we’ve taken to combat climate change.”

If you’re
really ranking them, the Clean Power Plan is at best the fourth-strongest
action that Obama has taken to combat climate change, behind his much-maligned 2009 stimulus package, which poured $90 billion into clean
energy and jump-started a green revolution; his dramatic increases in fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, which
should reduce our oil consumption by 2 million barrels per day; and his
crackdown on mercury and other air pollutants, which has helped inspire
utilities to retire 200 coal-fired power plants in just five years. The
new carbon regulations should help prevent backsliding, and they should provide
a talking point for U.S. negotiators at the global climate
talks in Paris, but the 2030 goals would not seem overly ambitious even
without new limits on carbon.

Take the
goals for coal. Plants that emitted nearly 600 million tons of carbon have been
retired or scheduled for retirement since 2005, but at a briefing yesterday,
Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy said the total
reductions for the sector by 2030 are only anticipated to be 870 million tons.
So most of the reductions have already been achieved. Reducing coal to 27
percent of our power capacity by 2030 would be significant, since it was about
50 percent in 2005 and is still nearly 40 percent. But the coal industry is in
shambles—another major producer, Alpha Natural Resources, is expected to file
for bankruptcy today — and the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, which has
met or exceeded all its goals since its launch in 2010, has set a goal of
retiring the entire U.S. coal fleet by 2030. If coal still provides 27 percent
of our power in 15 years, it’s hard to imagine us meeting any of Obama’s larger
climate goals.

The
starkest change in the EPA’s numbers between the draft and final versions of
the new rule was its increased expectations for renewable energy, which
prompted Republicans like Jeb Bush to denounce the plan as a disastrous assault
on America’s pocketbooks. But as McCarthy had
basically admitted to me, the expectations for renewables in the
draft plan were absurdly low, largely because they were based on the U.S. government’s routinely ludicrous energy forecasts. In fact the
draft plan’s bar was so low that five states had already achieved their 2030
goals. McCarthy suggested yesterday that the revisions have less to do with
substantive changes in the plan than with a belated recognition of America’s renewables boom: “We have larger
amounts of renewables that are anticipated to be in the energy mix regardless
of this rule.” Clearly, EPA will raise the bar, but as wind and solar prices
continue to plummet and installations continue to soar, a truly strong plan
would raise the bar a lot higher.

Nevertheless,
the new plan is already being hailed by environmentalists, denounced by
industry, and hyped by the media as a bombshell. It doesn’t fit the narrative
to suggest that the plan is really kind of eh. It only fits the available facts.

> The article above was written by Michael Grunwald and is reprinted from politico.eu.